Smoking isn't just a profession, it's an everyday skill
that everyone should learn, regardless of how badly.
A cigarette is a great enabler for this - and I endorse
this direction completely.
-- Your friendly tobacco association.
I have worked with a lot of people and mentored quite a few at companies I've worked at. Some were designers, some weren't even in the IT departments. Any that wanted to learn something about we programming I lead in the direction of PHP which I cut me teeth on before moving onto other things (currently Scala). They could get a dev environment up and running in no time, and better than that they could actually host something they did on shared hosting for practically nothing (or actually nothing as I sometimes gave people sandboxes in my hosting).
PHP is a gentle introduction to server concepts and have a fairly simple and not-too abstract syntax. Yes yes, when you really look at it there are some fairly glaring inconsistencies but the reality these people were not at the stage where they would notice or care.
It's also embarrassing to me as a professional who, like most, believe that some knowledge in programming will be of great use to people (in business or otherwise) and try my best to support anyone I know wanting to learn something or better themselves that this attitude is so common and outspoken with no logical justification or attempt at rational counter argument. Programming is hard. Good programming is harder, and the levels at which some of us seem to hold everyone around us (and yet somehow I doubt they hold themselves to every minute at work) are unrealistic and can push people further away than do what we should be aiming for which is bringing people in.
I'm really proud of every one of the people who stuck with learning and letting me help them and I think it's appalling to belittle their efforts indirectly with comments like this.
